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> They are not a dumping ground... They kind of are, and it's a role they seem to have embraced. In other words, a good % (50%+?) of the intake volume of cloth
by basseq 9y ago
> They are not a dumping ground...
They kind of are, and it's a role they seem to have embraced. In other words, a good % (50%+?) of the intake volume of clothes is not fit for secondary garment sale, and is instead sold "downstream" (in bulk) to tertiary markets ("poor countries", to use Bloomberg's parlance) and recycles to use as raw material. This is a source of revenue, too.
In other words, most thrift stores play an important role in the recycling chain. Otherwise, clothes would go into the garbage. After all, I can't put them in the green recycling bin with my cans, jars, and plastic.
- svachalek 9y agoActually, if they're really ruined, most recyclers will take them with the paper recycling.
- TillE 9y agoReally? Even in Germany where a ton of things go in household recycling bins (including basically all plastics and composites), you'd have to bring ruined clothes to the recycling center separately. Definitely only paper/cardboard in the paper bin.
- dfox 9y agoIn many places in US you don't have separate bins for paper, plastics, glass and what not, but only one (usually green) recycling bin for everything that is somehow recyclable.
- finnh 9y agoHere in Seattle, at least, recycling has transitioned to blue and green is now used for municipal compost bins. I think SF is the same.
- loeg 9y agoWe (Seattle) used to have separate bins in the late 90's or early 00's. A lot smaller total volume than the 96 gal toters, though.
- mjevans 9y agoI remember that as a kid in general King county (many of the suburbs of Seattle). However it's still not enough. * More bins for more specific TYPES of plastic * Better, machine readable, (BIG) labels * Financial incentives (carrot and stick) I'll elaborate more on that last point. Restaurants should be encouraged to create takeout packaging that is more easily recycled and/or composted. Similarly wrappers, boxes, cups and packets should have a per unit tax for non-environmentally friendly units. There should also be a push towards the use of glass and metal and paper over plastics. Sturdy glass bottles can be cleaned, thermal blast smoothed and re-used or broken down and recycled completely. Similarly metal lids and cans can also attain a new life with ease.
- loeg 9y agoThere's always tradeoffs. If you require people sort at home, more recyclables end up in the trash and/or people missort anyway. I agree we should incentivize use of more recyclable materials (in place of non-recyclable or more expensive to recycle materials) in general.
- JBlue42 9y agoBlue in LA as well.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoIn Japan, I think there were like ten bins, with clear instructions on how each should be used (eg take the label off the plastic bottle before binning it). It was a bit stressful before I got used to it.
- basseq 9y agoWhere "everything" may be limited. For example, I just went and looked: I can recycle "recyclable glass, aluminum, cans, plastics and paper".
- anigbrowl 9y agoIt's often far less convenient to get to a recycling center in the US (especially for people without a car) so they do more of their own sorting.
- cjsuk 9y agoWhere I live in the UK we just put the clothes in a bag next to the recycling containers and they get taken away. They also take away car batteries, car oil, small appliances, batteries etc In an effort to not have to go to the dump with them, as I didn’t have a car at the time, I actually chopped up two entire sofas with an axe and a knife and recycled them over the space of three months too :)
- DanBC 9y ago> as I didn’t have a car at the time, I actually chopped up two entire sofas with an axe and a knife and recycled them over the space of three months too :) And for sofas that aren't in unsalvagable condition there are furniture recycling projects around the country that will collect old furniture, give it a bit of a sprucing up, and sell it.
- basseq 9y agoOr Craigslist 'Free Stuff'.
- brewdad 9y agoI'd rather throw it away than deal with the flakes on Craigslist. It rains here so leaving it on the curb will only ensure it loses whatever residual value it might have held.
- cjsuk 9y agoYes indeed. These were perfectly good ones but the furniture salvage people locally didn’t want them and no one came on gumtree or freecycle :(
- DanBC 9y agoAh, that's a shame.
- brightsize 9y agoAt least where I lived in Germany, in cities, there were dumpster-sized stand-alone donation bins labeled "Kleidung und Schuhe" (clothing and shoes) everywhere.
- sdenton4 9y agoI've never heard of this, and have heard a presentation on how paper recycling works that makes me kinda doubt it.
- dragonwriter 9y agoKnowing something about how paper making works, I'm not at all surprised by the idea; since part recycling is going to have reduce everything to fibers anyway, I'm not sure why including clothes which you could use as feedstock to make paper would necessarily be functionally any different to the recycler than reducing those clothes to fibers, combining those with other fiber sources, making paper out of that, and then putting the resulting paper into the recycling.
- rags2riches 9y ago"Before the industrialisation of the paper production the most common fibre source was recycled fibres from used textiles, called rags." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper#Fiber_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper#Fiber_sources
- basseq 9y agoI loved this article on making paper for U.S. currency, which is produced by one company out of cotton and linen. Up until very recently, the company used denim as a source of raw material. > "But recently, Americans decided they liked jeans that stretched, so jeans companies began adding spandex to their fabric. Money with spandex in it wouldn't be money anymore, which means much of Crane's time is now spent on a global search for waste cotton that wasn't used to make elastic pants." http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a24292/benjamin-hundred-dollar-bill-0913/ http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a24292/benjamin-hundred...
- magic_beans 9y agoWhat country are you in? It's technically illegal in New York to put anything but PAPER in the cardboard bin.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago...is cardboard counted as paper?
- j_s 9y agoI wasn't going to share a link to a barely related discussion from last month, but: Recycling Chaos in U.S. As China Bans 'Foreign Waste' | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15888827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15888827 ... China doesn't want recycling anymore!
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoMaybe the place I volunteered at is weird but we did just throw those clothes into the garbage.
- justin66 9y agoWhat a waste.
- houseofzeus 9y agoRight, the mentality of a lot of people is I'd feel bad putting this in the trash so I'll put in the donation bin and then all thinking about where it actually ends up is for someone else to deal with.
- pdx 9y agoThat's as it should be. Nobody should expect every person in the country to individually solve the problem of how best to allocate that resource. The donation bin is the correct solution, so that the resource can be graded, sorted, sold locally, or compressed into bales and sold internationally.
- gowld 9y agoOnly if it's profitable for the donatee. It's not right for me to just dump my trash on your lawn and call it a "gift".
- compiler-guy 9y agoWhen that someone is someone who specializes in dealing with the issue, passing it along to them makes a lot of sense. I don't know the best way to recycle used clothes (for any definition of best). It is likely that a used-clothes donation center does. If that donation center can make a profit, even better.
- tomkarlo 9y agoWhat if they can't make a profit? It's a particularly American approach to recycling to assume that the onus on sorting / separating should not fall on the individual generating the trash. Other countries don't take this approach - instead, they place a high premium on disposal costs of unsorted trash, and require that anything you try to recycle be carefully sorted.
- philwelch 9y agoThis kind of runs counter to how the entire rest of modern civilization works, doesn't it? I don't have the foggiest idea how to grow grains, refine aluminum from bauxite, knit a sweater, build a water purifier, manufacture pens and pencils, bleach paper and bind it into spiral notebooks, raise livestock, or pick coffee beans, so I indirectly pay millions of people to do these things for me and focus on writing code. Why shouldn't I indirectly pay someone to sit at a conveyor belt and separate my recyclables? Single-stream recycling is a godsend, and it's annoying that I have to drive across town or find specific vendors to recycle textiles, batteries, electronics, and stuff like that.
- weej 9y agoAgree. See NPR's story from 2013 "The Afterlife of American Clothes" https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/12/10/247362140/the-afterlife-of-american-clothes https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/12/10/247362140/the-...
- jxramos 9y agothat's true, recycled denim makes for great insulation apparently https://www.homedepot.com/p/UltraTouch-16-in-x-48-in-Denim-Insulation-Multi-Purpose-Roll-60301-16482/202709974 https://www.homedepot.com/p/UltraTouch-16-in-x-48-in-Denim-I... I think a lot of the fill in punching bags is some sort of garbled/blended fabrics of some mixed variety.
- privacypoller 9y agoplus all those sketchy stuffed animals, when they run out of oily rags and newspaper!
- fencepost 9y ago(regarding the denim sound insulation and fire) Maybe, but there's a pretty good chance it's treated with flame retardants before use, and cotton fabric generally doesn't really burn that well - or at least not fast. There's a reason people working with hot glass wear long cotton shirts/pants for it.
- jxramos 9y agoI had a chemistry professor mention to the class she always travels with natural fabrics, cotton and the like, whenever she's onboard a flight. She mentioned something along the lines of it increases your chances of survival if ever there's a fire because synthetics melt and stick to your skin and burn like crazy.
- ben1040 9y agoI took some glassblowing classes and the first day safety lecture included a bit about this. Eye protection, closed toe shoes, and cotton clothes, precisely for this reason. Especially when we were first learning, it was easier than you might think to spill or splash 2000F liquid glass on the ground when gathering it out of the crucible, and that'd turn synthetic clothes into napalm.
- gowld 9y ago
- mc32 9y ago>After all, I can't put them in the green recycling bin with my cans, jars, and plastic. Depends, in SF you now can now put unfit fabrics in the blue bin[1]. For usable, they suggest place like USAgain. [1]https://www.recology.com/recology_news/sf-accepts-new-recyclable-items/ https://www.recology.com/recology_news/sf-accepts-new-recycl...